Snowpiercer: Bong Joon-ho Does Scifi a la Park Chan-wook

St. Teresa's The Interior Castle. Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death." Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. There are many examples of spiritual journeys that take their protagonists through a series of bizarre rooms before delivering them to an inner chamber housing a great if hidden truth. For Bong Joon-ho, the rooms in Snowpiercer may be train cars but the quest remains the same: The hero -- or in this case, the cannibalistic antihero (Chris Evans) -- must navigate a succession of rooms, each with its unique challenges, each with its own queer millieu, before arriving at the font of wisdom. The engine room, as it were. Along the way, he'll pass through a well-guarded water room with a lady tyrant clownishly played by a buck-toothed Tilda Swinton, a Willy Wonka-esque school room overseen by a blindingly sunny, pregnant fascist (Alison Pill), a kitchen where cockroaches are turned into gelatinous bricks of protein, a greenhouse, a steam room, a nightclub, and so on. The final chamber -- the engine room -- is ironically the domain of a child-kidnapping God-like tyrant (Ed Harris). Shades of The Truman Show?

What's unusual is that once Ed Harris' character unveils the TRUTH, the epiphany occurs not for Curtis but for Yona (Ko Ah-sung), a seer who hasn't heard it and who, as apprentice to the train's master locksmith Min-Soo (Song Kang-ho), has spent much of the time in a drug-addled haze. Are we hallucinating this scifi pic's parade of celebs along with her, for there's also John Hurt as a steampunk Yoda, Jamie Bell as a second banana in the people's army and a sleepy-eyed Octavia Spencer as a mom out to get her kid back. You might also cite Park Chan-wook as a co-star. While he doesn't appear on screen, his imprint is apparent as producer: Snowpiercer is packed with the video-game violence that has caused some critics to label Park as a purveyor of gore porn. I've never felt that way but I do feel the recurring blood-splattering here proved a bit much. Bong usually finds his shocks in psychology.

Doomsday Book: Three Short Films Herald End of the World as We Know It

The apocalypse elicits mixed feelings in me. The primacy of survival appeals to my minimalist bent. The mass destruction of life makes my heart break. Secretly, between you and me, I think that technological advancements don't always advance society but that doesn't mean that I want to see planet Earth turned into a cinder of its former self to make a technophobic point. The three doomsday scenarios played out in Doomsday Book tap into some of my fears and some of my frustrations about the end of the world scenarios, although only one does it in a way that's truly artful. That's not the first entry, Yim Pil-sung's In a Brave New World, a vegan parable that posits that one bad apple is going to transmogrify mankind into rageaholic zombies, after the rotten fruit is eaten by a cow that's eaten by another cow. The winner isn't the third short either, Yim's Happy Birthday. This woeful tale of world's end finds a little girl (Jin Ji-hee) mistakenly making an e-purchase for a meteor that resembles a giant 8-ball. You can scratch that one off your must-see list too.

The standout, for me, is -- Kim Jee-woon's The Heavenly Creature. This mesmerizing short concerns a service robot (voiced by Park Hae-il) at a Buddhist temple who may or not be the latest re-incarnation of Buddha himself. Both suspenseful and philosophical, The Heavenly Creature is chockful of clever social commentary about consciousness, loneliness, self-actualization, pets, corporate hierarchies, religion, perception, apartment dwelling, etc. It's strong enough to stand alone, even if it's running time is under an hour. The end is near. Who has time for a long movie?

Footnote for completists: Ryu Seung-beom headlines In a Brave New World as the Adam of the new zombie race while director Bong Joon-ho (The Host, Mother, Memories of Murder) also makes a brief appearance (in front of the camera for a change).

Antarctic Journal: Get to the Point (of Inaccessibility, That Is)

I'd never heard of a "point of inaccessibility" before Antarctic Journal. Evidently, the term refers to a geographical location that's extremely difficult to access, often because of its distance from the coast. Reaching such a landmark is a source of pride for explorers because it's so challenging. For the general public, however, there's little to recommend a POI (as it's sometimes called). The same could be said for Antarctic Journal, the pseudo-horror flick by director Yim Pil-sung (and co-written by auteur Bong Joon-ho). It's for extremists only. In other words, if you're committed to being a completist and seeing every movie starring Song Kang-ho then then you're eventually going to have to watch this dud about a South Korean crew searching for the South Pole's POI.

Which isn't to say that Song isn't good. As the merciless captain who hallucinates memories of his son's suicide when he isn't letting his crew members die one by one, the actor keeps the action grounded, which isn't easy given how much appears to be shot in front of a green screen. Keeping it real can only take you so far though, and what is real, really? Not the sudden nose bleed that he gets at one point. Not the novice (Yu Ji-tae) who he cavalierly bequeaths the ominous British expedition diary that they find in the snow. Not the cynical cohort (Yun Je-mun) who can't persuade anyone how crazy the captain obviously is. Not even the cheerful radio operator (Kang Hye-jeong) who flies off in a search helicopter when captain and company "vanish into thin air." I'm not saying, Antarctic Journal needed to be a naturalistic take on a devastating expedition, but shots of a frozen eyeball and a ghostly woman's hand come across as pretty random and just leave me wondering whether the film is about to take a serious left turn. Maybe it did. Over and over. Which is another way of saying Antarctic Journal just goes in circles. And made me rethink my initial plan to curate a Song movie marathon, despite how wonderful I still think he is.

Barking Dogs Never Bite: In the Beginning, There Was a Genius

Yun-ju (Lee Sung-jae) leads a cheerless life. His domineering, pregnant wife (Kim Ho-jeong) has him cracking walnuts on a whim and his teaching career looks bound for nowhere if he doesn't raise $10,000 fast as a bribe for his professorship. Save the pity party for someone else though because Yun-ju's way of dealing with the chip on his shoulder is to kill the yapping lapdogs in his apartment building. Once you've seen him off a beribboned terrier and a toy doberman, you're kind of glad that he's got it so bad. And anyway, someone else is in greater need of your sympathy. That's Hyeon-nam (Bae Dun-na), the management company's spacey bookkeeper who's on a mission to find the dog-killer and a purpose in life (with a gal pal played by Go Su-hee). Because this is a Bong Joon-ho film, the narrative ends up being much more than those two intertwining tales. There are also subplots involving an indiscriminate janitor who tells good ghost stories, a crazy old lady who dries radishes on the roof, and a homeless man whose bad luck ends up seeming to work in his favor. When you consider that Barking Dogs Never Bite is Bong's feature film debut, you realize that he hasn't got better with each successive movie. He's always been great. He's just been great in different ways.

Mother: Family Ties Can Have a Strangling Effect When They're Too Strong

Moms of the world, it's time to face an ugly truth: You inspire some seriously freaky movies from all over the world: Mamma Roma (Italy), Mommie Dearest (U.S.A.), All About My Mother (Spain) and now Mother (South Korea) to name just a few. This last one -- from writer-director Bong Joon-ho -- stars actress Kim Hye-ja in what must certainly be the role of her life: an off-center, unlicensed acupuncturist/herbalist who'll go to any extreme to clear her son (Won Bin) of murder charges. That her 20-something child happens to be a simpleton with a spotty memory and a bad temper isn't helping her cause but like many a good mother before her, she forges on despite the odds against her. The cops exact a confession from her boy? So what! Her lawyer writes off the case as too difficult? So be it! Her son's shady best friend (Jin Gu) extorts her? That's fine as long as he furthers her efforts to unravel the case. What starts off as a heartbreaking homage to maternal devotion ends up a disturbing examination of obsession and an indictment of the sacrosanctity of familial bonds. If you sacrifice everything for someone, then you could end up with nothing but that in the end. Is it enough? You'll have to ask your mother.

The Host: Honey, I Lost the Kid... to a Mutant Monster

Government. Military. Big business. The medical establishment. The media. Which is the most inhumane, the most corrupt, the most evil? While The Host's central family unites to track down the aquatic Godzilla who's kidnapped their daughter (Ko Ah-sung), director Bong Joon-ho hilariously castigates the movie's true villains -- those power-crazed officials who keep getting in their way. Yet The Host is hardly some diatribe of antiestablishmentarianism; Bong is critical of his core characters, too: the slacker dad (Song Kang-ho), his self-defeating sister (Bae Du-na), his bossy brother (Park Hae-il) and the lovable grandfather (Byeon Hie-bong). Everyone does stupid things, no matter what your walk in life. To err is human. But what's also human are the brave, crazy acts that love can inspire us to. What elevates The Host from Kaiju camp to exceptional monster movie is how Bong uses familial love -- as opposed to romantic -- to propel his four squabbling yet noble family members to the very bowels of the Earth. You could say their rescue efforts fail but the final image of a re-configured family of survivors is nothing if not uplifting. Song's performance as the endearing doofus dad is frankly unforgettable.

Memories of Murder: Postcards From the Dead

What makes Memories of Murder such an unusually gripping detective film isn't some requisite, titillating peeling of layers that ends up revealing the twisted logic of a sick-but-brilliant serial killer's mind. Instead, director Bong Joon-ho slowly draws you into the frustrated psyches of his two policemen as they find themselves increasingly frustrated in their attempts to crack the code. It's a momentum headed towards the void, not hell. The country mouse / city mouse conflict between the two investigators is initially played for chuckles but eventually the contrast in techniques (primitive vs. sophisticated) remains just that. A contrast. Bong never ends up celebrating one over the other or even equating them as yin and yang. Justice, it turns out, takes her own sweet time if she even arrives at all. I'm always psyched to see Song Kang-ho in a movie (The Host, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Joint Security Area); he's somehow likable even when he's playing what should be a fairly unsympathetic cop. Here, as a self-aggrandizing doofus who must come to grips with his own inadequacies, he brings his usual love-me-even-though-I'm-stupid persona that personally I find impossible to resist.